Tuesday, 28 October 2008

African chimps decline 'alarming'

BBC Science & Environment: "The population of the endangered West African chimpanzees in Ivory Coast has fallen by about 90% in less than 20 years, a study has suggested.

Researchers found 90% fewer nests than a similar audit carried out in 1990, which suggested the chimp population had crashed from 12,000 to about 1,200."

I mentioned this at breakfast, and the kids calmly shot back with some school-fed bio-jargon that meant, basically, "yeah, well, it's ok, there's still some in zoos and private collections" ... as if that's good enough.

Is this the manifest danger of Reductionist dogma taught for science? So obsessed with DNA, they miss the whole-system FUNCTION of the creature?